Mac Pro 2006 – Upgraded to 8 Cores/Highpoint RAID/GTX 260

**********SOLD************

Asking price is $999 but I am willing to listen to offers and I apologize for the long winded post.

Good day everyone, I’m looking at selling my Mac Pro tower as I very rarely need the horsepower of an 8 core workstation these days.

This machine started out as an October 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 machine configured as follows:

- two dual-core 2.0 GHz CPUs, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive, nVidia GeForce 7300 GT
- Airport and Bluetooth

As of now the machine is upgraded to the following specifications:

- 2 x 4 Core Xeon ES5320 cpus clocked to 2.33 GHZ using the 1006-1333 MHZ bridge trick.
- Intel® Xeon® Processor E5320 (8M Cache, 1.86 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB) (http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=28031)
- 6GB of 667MR FB-DIMM DR RAM (4 1GB sticks and 4 512MB Sticks)
- Nvidia GTX 260 512MB video card – using EFI injector method
- HighPoint RocketRaid 2314 PCI-Express x4 eSATA 4 Port RAID Controller Card
- Highpoint Technologies RR2314 HighPoint RocketRaid... in stock at OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Highpoint%20Technologies/RR2314/)
- 320GB 720 RPM Boot
- 2 X 320GB 720 RPM Scratch Drives
- Included Dual Layer SuperDrive
- HL-DT-ST BD-RE GBW-H10N – 25GB Blu-Ray Writer


This machine will still out perform a quad-core 2009 Mac-Pro that sells refurbished for $2199 with less RAM and extras. It will come close in perfromance to a 2.4GHZ 8-Core refurb that sells for $2899 as well.

The GTX 260 works flawlessly in the system with both Leopard and Snow Leopard with CUDA and Open CL working as well. The original 7300GT is still in the system to act as the EFI boot helper and to give you visuals while the OS is booting (for selecting start disk and such).

64Bit kernel operation is not possible with this series of Mac Pro but full 64Bit applications support is operational. But I hear that might be changeable with various EFI boot-loaders.

Windows 7 64-Bit is not officially supported by BootCamp on this machine but can be made to work well without too much trouble.

The ES5320 CPUS have been running at 2.33GHZ for 3 years now with no heat or stability issues in Mac OS or BootCamp.

The RocketRAID 2314 is one of the better cost effective eSATA RAID cards available for Mac Pro systems.

Upgrade Options that are open to this machine.

- upgradeable to 32GB RAM - Canada RAM sells memory in Canada - Apple Mac Pro Penryn 4-Core and 8-Core, Dual intel Xeon, Quad Workstation (http://canadaram.com/apple_mac_pro.htm)
- videocard upgradable to Radeon 5870/5770/4870 cards (no hacks needed)
- videocard GTX 570/580 in Lion (and maybe Snow Leopard) with injector
- SSD Boot Drive

This system still has a number of years left in it performance wise as configured (Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 is very fast on this computer) and has lots of upgrade room still available to it.

This computer will come with a clean install of Snow Leopard and is upgradeable to LION.


thanks

For those wondering, I'm located in Toronto.

thanks

There is an EFI64 trick now - published on Netkas - using Chameleon.

Killer deal BTW